The latest JOLTS update finds total hires in January down by a rather large 372k, leaving the monthly seasonally-adjusted rate at still 5 million. Given that the estimated hires rate increased unusually in December, it seems as if January was the statistical catchup or seasonal give-back. That leaves intact the same sideways pattern that first appeared around October 2014. Throughout [...]
The updated JOLTS numbers for September just confirmed more nonsense on the part of the BLS. Job openings continue to be all their own while the rest of the data series, even as the whole is indexed to the CES, at best stagnates. On every other count, including hires and quits, there is something drastically different in the US labor [...]
The BLS published its updated JOLTS figures for August last week, and while most commentary continues to focus on the ephemeral Job Openings category it shouldn’t. Though Job Openings declined sharply by just about 300,000 in the current estimate (from a slight downward revision of July) it still rates as completely out of alignment with the rest of the JOLTS [...]
On a day when the Fed will likely overshadow everything with unearned attentiveness, the BLS released its annual benchmark for the Establishment Survey. Actually, it was just the preliminary estimate for the coming benchmark revision, which was curiously downward. It bears repeated that the BLS does not estimate the total count of either employed persons or payrolls but rather each [...]
If on the fence trying to decide whether surging job openings or tailing hiring is the true representation of the economy (recognizing that these are not mutually exclusive propositions, just that it isn’t very likely they both coexist in anything but subjectively statistical fancy) Gallup just offered far more of the latter. Should actual job openings hold some kind of [...]
Typically when any statistic gets way out ahead of itself it will eventually revert toward its prior state. That is the nature of stochastic modeling in economic accounts and it presents a great weakness. It is not unshared, however, as that is nothing more than recency bias applied to a quite dynamic world. The great flaw in any stochastic model [...]
The latest updates for the JOLTS showed that job openings in April surged to a new series high. Jumping by 267k (seasonally adjusted), the trend in job openings is being used as confirmation that there must be some robust underlying trend in overall payrolls despite the ubiquitous slump everywhere else. In other words, this is another series from the BLS [...]
The latest August figures for the JOLTS companion to the payroll climate continue to raise the possibility of statistical corruptions. Back in June, the level of job openings suddenly and very sharply spiked upward. That was used as confirmation of the ongoing surge in employment, but without attribution as to how closely job openings relate to payroll indications through the [...]
I think it pretty clear after examining the rest of the labor market that the pop in JOLTS estimation of job openings fits well within the idea of statistical problems. This is wholly unsurprising given that JOLTS is directly tied into the BLS’ Current Employment Situation report, meaning that part of the Establishment Survey forms the basis for the calculation [...]
The term consumer exhaustion can apply to several circumstances, but typically they all relate to exhaustion of resources. Households can appeal to wages, transfers, savings or debt, and usually some combination of the four, to maintain living standards and discretionary budgets. So exhaustion, like that of yesterday’s GDP, could be due to any one segment failing more than the others [...]
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